PAYBACK WITH MORVEN CHRISTIE
The new BritBox thriller series Payback follows Lexie Noble (MORVEN CHRISTIE) as she becomes entangled in a dangerous police operation to topple crime boss Cal Morris (Peter Mullan).
Scottish actress Morven (42) is well-known as the lead in The Bay, where she played detective Lisa Armstrong, a role which earned her a Scottish Bafta nomination for best actress.
She also stars in Netflix’s supernatural series Lockwood
& Co and was in Grantchester’s first three seasons as Amanda Hopkins, the love interest of James Norton’s character.
In Payback, Lexie lives an idyllic life in the suburbs of Edinburgh, unaware that her husband, Jared (Thoren Ferguson), has been laundering Cal’s illegal earnings, and that he’s being watched by detectives DC Jibran Khan (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and DCI Adam Guthrie (Derek Riddell), who are determined to bring Cal to justice.
WHAT ATTRACTED YOU TO PAYBACK?
I thought the character had so much scope for me to play with. She was somebody sort of hemmed in by incredibly difficult circumstances and that’s always really fun to play your way out of.
WHO IS LEXIE AND WHAT’S HER PART IN THE STORY?
She’s a stay-at-home mum of two, a sixyear-old daughter and a two-year-old son. She is about to go back to work at the accountancy firm that she shares with her husband, Jared, and when he’s killed in a seemingly random street attack, her whole world implodes. She’s estranged from her family and she doesn’t really have any friends, so she’s kind of in the centre of Jared’s life.
She goes back to work and very quickly finds out that Jared has been using their firm to launder money for an organised crime group. Lexie has to sort of take over that role and also find a load of missing money while trying to protect her family from the threat of Cal Morris.
HOW TOUGH WAS IT TO PLAY THE SCENE WHERE LEXIE SEES HER HUSBAND KILLED?
The weird thing about it is that because Jared himself is only in the story for about three pages it’s not like we’d built a huge relationship. It was one of the first things we shot and we had to keep coming back and shooting different parts of it throughout the entire thing, so we shot some of it [last] August and we shot other parts of it in December.
LEXIE ALSO FINDS HERSELF IN A TRICKY POSITION, HAVING TO WORK WITH THE POLICE, AND CAL.
Yes. There are promises being made and then whipped away from her by the police because they want Cal Morris. She’s on a tightrope and she’s laserfocused on one thing, which is getting her kids out of this situation.